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Excerpt from The Diamond: A Study in Chinese and Hellenistic Folk-Lore Legend OF the diamond valley. The Liang se kung lei,1 one of the most curious books of Chinese literature, contains the following account In the period T'ien-kien (502 - 520) of the Liang dynasty, Germans in 1907, as the diamonds proved to be of little value for gems, While answer ing well for industrial purposes (engineering and Mining Journal, Vol. LXXXIV, 1907, p. An anonymous writer in Mines and Minerals (vol. XXIII, 1903, p. 552) reports as follows on Chinese diamond-digging: The Chinese procure the diamonds by the following method: After the summer rains which, according to them, produce diamonds on the surface of the soil, whence the uselessness of digging to find them, they walk back and forth over the sand of the torrents. The fragments of diamonds, on account of their sharp points and edges, penetrate the rye straw of their sabots to the exclusion of other gravel. When they think there is a sufficient quantity they make a pile of the sabots and burn them. The ashes are afterwards passed through a sieve to separate the diamonds. Those which we saw were small, varying from the size of a grain of millet to that of a hemp seed. They are generally of a light-yellow color like those of the Cape, though there are some perfectly white. When they find them of sufiicient Size they break them, as they told us, in order to make drill points, for, not knowing how to cut them, the Chinese in general do not consider them as precious stones. They prefer the jade, the amethyst, the carnelian, and the agate. Only the rich Chinese of the ports and of Peking have bought cut diamonds, imported from India or Europe, to ornament their hats or their rings, since the Dutch first brought them into China in the sixteenth century. The Shan-tung collectors sell them throughout China, and their trade is of considerable importance. The exact date of this modern diamond-digging is not known to me, but it seems not to be earlier than the latter part of the nineteenth century. I can find no reference to it in Chinese literature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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